Poole, UK – Codestone, a leading provider of SAP Business One, infrastructure and cloud solutions, today announced that is has designed and installed a more cost effective, flexible and reliable infrastructure for The Pinewood Studios Group, one of the leading providers of studio and related services to the worldwide film and television industries. The new architecture, which consists of VMware on HP servers, EMC VNX SAN storage, Citrix XenDesktop virtualization, Veeam back up and replication and Codestone’s SystemSure 24/7/365 support, is now capable of supporting the needs of the Group and its users for the next five years.

“We now have a robust infrastructure based on leading technologies which offers us the ability to flex our infrastructure as and when we need. This new infrastructure has been designed to incorporate a high availability and disaster recovery strategy,” explained Darren Woolfson, Director of Technology at Pinewood Studios. “Pinewood has realised tangible cost saving through the virtualised strategy; from buying lower volumes of expensive hardware through to operational maintenance including space and cooling.”

The Pinewood Studios Group had ageing physical hardware that was in urgent need of replacement. When considering its approach to this problem, Pinewood decided that it needed a more resilient platform that would reduce local downtime through single point failures. Data storage needs were growing at a fast rate as more users required access to intensive applications. There was also a desire to unify the desktop strategy, extending the life of the machines whilst centralising the management of local applications. Pinewood also required a full disaster recovery plan, utilising secondary locations to ensure that if the main site was to fail, then essential services would still be available to its key users.

“We carried out an extensive analysis of the existing server workloads using Platespin. The real-time data collected was then used as the basis for the design of their new virtualised infrastructure,” explained Jeremy Bucknell, Managing Director, Codestone Group Ltd. “We analysed the data as part of the Project Definition Analysis (PDA) and, following in-depth consultation sessions with Pinewood, decided on a virtual infrastructure with offsite Disaster Recovery (DR) replication.”

Pinewood’s new platform has now been designed to deliver the existing and future workloads on a virtualised environment, using VMware hypervisor technology combined with centralised storage based on EMC VNX SAN. Citrix XenDesktop was deployed across the local desktops, extending their functional life from 3 to over 5 years, as well as centralising all application management and updates. This means entire desktops or applications can be upgraded very quickly and with no user disruption.

A back up and replication strategy has been implemented using Veeam to backup and replicate data to an offsite location. Snapshots of the virtual machines are taken and the entire workload or the files within the workloads is backed up during normal working hours. The new infrastructure is supported by Codestone SystemSure support, which monitors Pinewood’s new platform and acts as a point of escalation for support.

“Through methodical consultation and implementation, Codestone has delivered a best of breed technology solution which has resulted in a truly flexible and robust infrastructure,” said Woolfson. “From a day-to-day perspective, the management of user’s environments is now centralised which has saved us many man hours of admin based tasks.”

About Codestone
Established in 1997, Codestone is a leading provider of IT application, infrastructure and cloud solutions, for organisations ranging from SMEs to major PLCs, national and international. With offices in Poole, London, Midlands and Cheshire, Codestone provides turnkey solutions from leading industry vendors including SAP, Microsoft, Citrix, EMC and VMware.

Codestone is a global leader in SAP Business One, SAP Gold Partner, SAP Master VAR and Member of the EMEA Partner Executive Committee. In contrast to many of its competitors, it also combines its UK domestic and international experience in SAP Business One with extensive Infrastructure and cloud solutions expertise.

The head office, in Poole, Dorset, is a state-of-the-art, custom designed technology centre that houses a professional, experienced and passionate team of over 70 IT specialists. It has delivered hundreds of solutions across numerous disciplines and sectors, and has a proven track record of providing full life-cycle projects from concept through to implementation. For more information, please visit: http://www.codestone.net or follow us on Twitter: @CodestoneGroup

Further Information

Codestone Group Ltd.
Stuart Tarrant
Communications Officer
Tel: +44 1202 241124
Email: sgt@codestone.net

Further information (external website)